It has always amused me that the tourists to the US that I’ve spoken to are often very excited to see raccoons, and disappointed if they don’t see them before they leave....
I was excited to see squirrels, lightning bugs and a racoon in the US.
When people come to Australia they obviously want to see kangaroos, koalas and platypus and quokka. Koalas are very rare to see in the wild, and a visit to a zoo will score you a sleeping ball on a branch. Kangaroos are frequently roadkill if you go outside the city. Quokka require a long trip to a really remote location. You'll also almost never see a platypus, even the ones at the zoo you might catch a water ripple at best.
But if you're headed to Sydney city, guaranteed you'll spot the almighty and much maligned "bin chicken", our Australian white ibis. Often not quite white from the bins. At night they serenade you with their collective honking from their tree, which can be easily spotted by the masses of white poop underneath. And you'll see fruit bats in the evening. Hopefully not the daytime corpses hanging from electrical cables while they slowly rot, but that's not altogether unlikely either, unfortunately.
The bin chickens are my kin, I'm in the small minority here who appreciate them.
And yeah, the flying foxes are a surprise for most foreigners. They're also pretty big and often fly low at dusk, so they can be slightly startling too, even though they're just adorable fuzzy harmless nectar drinkers. It's a pity they screech too, it might be easier to reassure non-locals that they're not dangerous.
People are also often surprised to see all the other Sydney city wildlife and how much of it there is, especially rainbow lorrikeets. Everyone loves the lorrikeets, but people from the northern hemisphere are especially awestruck when they see them. It's understandably almost a little surreal to have such brightly colored parrots hanging out in the middle of a city, if you're someone who comes from a city that is just pigeons and sparrows.
If you want to see a croc, just go walking near the shallow water of the top half of the country's coast. You won't see the croc for long, and it will be the last thing you ever see, but it will be up close and very personal.
Seriously though, you don't go to see salt water crocodiles in the wild or even go near any body of water on the northern coast. If you can see one with the naked eye in the wild, you're already too close. They're extremely fast, extremely aggressive, and the males get up to 6m / 20ft long and 1000kg / 2200lb. They are very much a zoo only thing.
The end of the world is a fair description, but small is not. It is the largest privately funded museum in the Southern Hemisphere and has 6000m² (64583 ft²) of gallery space.
Small point of order: MONA, despite how it sounds when pronounced as an acronym, is not a sex museum. It's the Museum of Old and New Art. You may return to your debate.
Personally, I'm finding the whole thing delicious. As someone who went to university in a building where the post-graduate / staff floor didn't have a female bathroom - likely because when it was built women were only expected to clean and serve tea in that space - I appreciate the artist and museum setting official legal precedent around this topic. And doing so with panache.
I channel the despair, anger and misery into working on solutions to help marginalized peoples. I don't have all the answers to the world's problems, and I can't solve it all, but I can show the people who might have the answers that there is someone in their corner who supports them in their efforts. Even if those people haven't been born yet, demonstrating the power of empathy and collaboration sets them up to choose constructive paths. If I give up on them, then it becomes much easier and more likely that they will choose the same anti-social self-interested motives that are destroying us all. But, if they are going to be able to make that choice at all, they need to be in a position where they aren't in survival mode all the time.
We're all just organisms who exist for a brief flash of time on a galactic scale, ultimately this is all meaningless. But as someone who identifies as a bit of an existentialist, I make my meaning. You can too.
It also enables me to leave the weed for wind-down time, mostly. Depends on how badly my health is doing, and it's pretty variable.
How is it victim blaming to try to define the scope? Most of the demographic who visit lemmy wouldn't consider fast food workers to be rich, and I certainly don't, but by income they are literally at the halfway point globally. To the billions of people who are below even the 25th percentile, they may well consider a US fast food worker rich. The extreme poverty that exists in this world is a very well hidden atrocity, but the perspectives of those people still matter to me and still should be taken into account.
I'm using the original definition of the word meme: "a unit of cultural information spread by imitation". Meme as a word doesn't imply that it's a comedic image macro on the internet, but I appreciate that the more modern slang usage might have made that confusing for you.
I just think a lot of the people who are keen for "eat the rich", especially in its more violent forms, may not realise they're on the menu themselves when the issue is looked at from a global all-of-humanity perspective. And, I encourage people to really think about who and what is included or excluded in the definitions of "rich", what level of variation is acceptable to them, and what a sustainable living situation even looks like for the world's population if we had total equality. They're all very hard questions that I don't have an answer to either.
To an extent, it's completely understandable. To have a significant proportion of the richest people in the world struggle to pay all their bills or afford medical care is a really hard concept to reconcile. And if you're someone who has never been exposed to a sizable group of people who don't have a reliable source of clean water or the most basic of staple foods, it's very easy to not realise how privileged you might be - even if you're really genuinely struggling compared to everyone around you.
To me it highlights that the problem is much deeper than wealth inequality, even though that's a huge symptom. But that's another topic altogether.
Thanks for understanding where I was coming from though!
I’m part of a small group of Jr Self Taught Web Developers who were recently brainstorming ideas for a Group Project App we could put together and actually create a user base....
so they could be edited out of the episode and then the user could also download said episode where ads are cut out of the final audio file.
This is the part that might be problematic and I can see being part of a civil suit (I am not a lawyer). Depending on how you collect and store the episodes (which you may not actually have to do to achieve your goal, but is the easiest solution) you would likely run afoul of "distribution" precedents in the US that may result in a judgement against you.
But even if you didn't actually break the law, the media lobbies globally are well known for filing huge numbers of lawsuits over anything that even looks a little like it might be costing them money. Defending yourself at all is hard time-consuming and often expensive. It's not something I would recommend going into casually.
https://torrentfreak.com/category/lawsuits/ is a great site for learning about the current lawsuits from a tech perspective, and has helped me out many times over the last decade. It's one of the gems of the internet, in my opinion.
For example, I personally can’t listen to Guns and Roses without immediately thinking “that Axl sure is an asshole”, and that sours the entire experience.
Die antwoord also adopted, abused and abandoned an albino (Edit: my mistake, he has hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia) child, Tokkie, who spoke out a few years ago. They're truly awful and Tokkie's documentary is worth watching.
Also Marilyn Manson has been evicted from my music library for sexual abuse. I have no interest in supporting known exploiters, and I can't listen to their music without thinking about how awful they are as people. No regrets, there's plenty more musicians out there worth my time.
Maybe, just maybe it shouldn’t cost close to 10k to even TRY to have a kid through IVF? More like 15k out of pocket costs till the Medicare rebate anyway....
I'm likely infertile, and no thanks. I'm having enough trouble existing and being employed with long covid on top of pre-existing medical issues for which i have long run out of medical options, certainly all that are available under Medicare. Maybe I would sort of want children if I weren't struggling to just eat, work and sleep? Or maybe the bleak future of humanity would still be enough to convince me not to condemn another person to it.
Falling birth rates might be a little more than just an IVF cost issue. Perhaps we should look into that instead of slapping on a subsidy bandaid and hoping it cures the symptoms.
There's a person who has been living a mostly normal life with 90% of his brain missing. Perhaps we could just re-examine society's ableism and how we design our systems of government to allow single points of failure instead? RFK Jr. has terrible opinions, but also had them before having a literal brain worm.
No, it's just better than other places. It's overstressed, underprioritised, acute-focussed and failing the population at large. Better than the US, even exponentially, doesn't mean good.
Many of us are getting banned from other instances because there is a bug where kbin is sending way too much traffic per interaction. I know that was affecting federation (according to other instance admins) so It might have something to do with that. The content on kbin does seem to me like it's not in sync at all, but I haven't measured it.
All we can really do for now is hope for a fix and not interact with posts from other instances.
Anyone got any recommendations or warnings about specific hdd / ssd / storage brands or models at the moment? Thinking about buying another drive instead of being smart and cleaning up my files. I've been pretty happy with Samsung but I've heard they had a clunker of a drive with high failure rates lately. HDD, SSD and I think I...
Yep, got a Samsung evo 870 in there, still going strong for like a decade. The HGST spinner I have is also pretty longlived. Weren't they bought out by WD though? I feel like I remember hearing that the quality has declined severely.
Having said that, I do also have a WD .... black? In there that has also lasted. I will check out gold though, and the mx500
backblaze drive failure report
Excellent, this is what I was hoping to find again but i couldn't remember the name. I also assumed it would be paywalled after all these years... if I could even get google to deliver the link.
I've always considered doing a raid array but the cheapness of remote servers these days makes it feel like overkill combined with being expensive and centralized. I just have an external enclosure and a mess of duplicate files across smaller outdated drives at the moment. It's not ideal, but that's ADHD for you.
Feeling thwarted by the 404, I suddenly remembered there are plenty of curated feeds over in Collections for us to browse. Have updated one of mine to reflect newer communities.
Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82....
Dennett taught me how to find common ground with very different people in discussions which might otherwise be heated arguments. I was lucky enough to see one of his talks some years ago, and his work and methods are something I frequently think about even today. His writing style was playful and accessible, but it paled in comparison to his presentation which really demonstrated his abundant charisma. His passing is truly a huge loss in a world that increasingly needs his teachings. My condolences to his family and the communities he fostered.
Vale, Daniel C. Dennett. I hope I can continue to do even a shred of justice to your contributions.
Edit with link: Dennett (somewhat accidentally) created a community for interdenominational Christian clergy who are also secret atheists. It started with a research paper with interviews and some analysis of their similar/different experiences. Ignore the abstract if academic language isn't your thing, the rest of the paper is a much easier and interesting read:
In your country, what "common" animals are tourists most excited to see?
It has always amused me that the tourists to the US that I’ve spoken to are often very excited to see raccoons, and disappointed if they don’t see them before they leave....
Women-only museum becomes a toilet to keep men out (www.bbc.com)
Australia’s Mona asked a court to reverse its ruling that allowed men inside a women’s only space....
How to deal with living in a world with no future without being high 24/7?
Been high nonstop for years. I realize it’s bad for my health. But at least being high feels good....
What does 'eat the rich' mean to you?
Are there any legal issues recreating YouTube SponsorBlock for Podcasts?
I’m part of a small group of Jr Self Taught Web Developers who were recently brainstorming ideas for a Group Project App we could put together and actually create a user base....
What is the answer?
Share some objective or subjective wisdom you’ve learned recently.
Can you separate the artist as a person from the music?
For example, I personally can’t listen to Guns and Roses without immediately thinking “that Axl sure is an asshole”, and that sours the entire experience.
Biden calls for ‘immediate ceasefire’ in Gaza (www.theguardian.com)
There's a baby drought in Australia. Maybe we should fund IVF? (www.abc.net.au)
Maybe, just maybe it shouldn’t cost close to 10k to even TRY to have a kid through IVF? More like 15k out of pocket costs till the Medicare rebate anyway....
RFK Jr. says he had parasitic brain worm and undisclosed memory loss (www.washingtonpost.com)
Archive Link
Bondi Junction mall attack: 'Obvious' killer targeted women, Sydney police say (www.bbc.com)
Joel Cauchi, 40, sent the crowded Westfield Bondi Junction complex into panic on Saturday when he began stabbing people with a long blade....
Aurora Australis turned it up tonight (slrpnk.net)
Are we cut off?
I can only get my subscriptions and not the all feed. I feel like maybe I am only getting kbin content.
Thinking about buying more storage. Warn me of the lemons!
Anyone got any recommendations or warnings about specific hdd / ssd / storage brands or models at the moment? Thinking about buying another drive instead of being smart and cleaning up my files. I've been pretty happy with Samsung but I've heard they had a clunker of a drive with high failure rates lately. HDD, SSD and I think I...
If you're encountering the Subscribed 404 error, this is a good time to revisit Collections
Feeling thwarted by the 404, I suddenly remembered there are plenty of curated feeds over in Collections for us to browse. Have updated one of mine to reflect newer communities.
Daniel C. Dennett, Widely Read and Fiercely Debated Philosopher, Dies at 82 (www.nytimes.com)
Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82....