Tamara Rubin is a grifter with no expertise who bought an XRF gun to use to scan random objects as fodder for her blog where she gets money from affiliate links. Her wikipedia page talks about a few of her financial crimes. I wouldn’t worry anything she puts out.

Reject bartering, embrace gift economy

I just do not know what to think about outfits like this. On the one hand, it’s hilarious that they are using the exact same compound that is released by fossil fuel companies, so any attempts to regulate its release will effect fossil fuel burners more than them. Some states have already banned the intentional release of anything designed for positive effects on the climate, though (i think Tennessee was the first).

On the other hand, the carbon credit economy is largely a sham and a fake fix for our woes, and only really serves to facilitate companies to wash their hands of environmental impacts. Solar geoengineering introduced to this system is destined for failure as well, I believe. We may need to resort to solar geoengineering to preserve what we can of our world, but it will have to be through international cooperation and study combined with reduction of carbon pollution, not by two dudes in a fly-by-night operation releasing balloons.

Recycling plastic is a sham created by the plastics industry to make us let them create as many plastics as they want. Yes, it can be recycled, but a heck of a lot of the time, it’s not profitable to do so, and a certain percentage will be littered, fall off a truck, or whatever, and end up in the ocean. Ultimately, that’s all their fault for making it in the first place.

If a someone manufactures poison and sells it to whoever wants it, and someone puts it in the water supply, who is more at fault, the person who put it in the water, or the person who profited by no-questions-asked sales?

You can still work with that a bit. Basically you just want to have stuff other than just non-native turf grass. Even having clover mixed in makes your lawn not need fertilizer to stay green, and it has flowers that benefit insects. Dandelions and plantains can grow anywhere, and they both produce edible greens, and they basically show up on their own.

I think you would need far more than 25% to get to where the average “why don’t we make things anymore” dork dreams about

American manufacturing has been on a consistently upward trajectory and has never been higher. Many things made in America either are highly skilled, highly automated, or both. The hubbub about “bringing manufacturing back” is all just a smokescreen to redirect the anger from Americans who used to have stable, well paying, union factory jobs, who never will have one again.

Break Up NOAA. NOAA consists of six main offices: l The National Weather Service (NWS); l The National Ocean Service (NOS); l The Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR); l The National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS); l The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS); and l The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations and NOAA Corps. Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful func- tions. It should be broken up and downsized.

Thats from Project 2025, emphasis mine.

Alley cropping with trees always seems like a win-win to me. You can’t run a massive harvester though those fields, but you can certainly still mechanically harvest. You could do more than just one tree crop, too. The late emerging leaves of walnut remind me of the Kentucky coffeetree, which is super hardy, and I believe it fixes nitrogen, but it’s an ice age relic so it’s leaves come out late and drop early.

I’d be interested to learn more about harvesting 2 annuals intercropped. I’m assuming the alfalfa/perennial wheat example would just be mowed down for silage or something.

he had used gender-neutral names to the point where it was never clear, but also didn’t matter anyway.

He almost does that. He uses a lot of made-up scifi names that aren’t obviously gendered, but then point out that the character is male.

He does get a lot better over time, though.

Yeah, I think he actually admitted that he didn’t really know any women when he first started writing until he met and then married his wife, so he avoided writing them. It is weird though cause his writing style (from what ive read) is not very character focused, anyway, so a lot of his male characters could easily just be declared female and no one would spot the difference.

Yeah, I think this is the most reasonable approach. Everyone else is suggesting that falling on your sword is the first line of defense, and it really shouldn’t be.

If you are the attorney general, and the president asks you to fire someone prosecuting him, sure, resign.

If you are just some person trying to get by, shooting yourself in the foot isn’t going to help anyone. If you refuse to do a job, and they just hire someone else to do it, you’ve only really lost a lot at the cost of a small moral victory immediately rendered nil.

Not to get too utilitarian, but the ultimate goal should be to have the best outcome for everyone, not to just make the first decision that seems to be right.

There’s a saying about fascism “Do not obey in advance”, and the idea is that during the rise of fascism, the fascists don’t actually have to make people do what they want. Lots of people comply with their goals well before being forced to. We are seeing many companies eliminating DEI objectives because it’s what the fascists want, even though they don’t have to.

This could be one of those situations where a frank conversation with the project lead to see if that’s what’s happening because there is a chance to convince them not to obey in advance. It could also be that the training is going for federal agencies that have been “legally” required to eliminate “gender” from any training materials.

I think it would be foolish to turn down the job without at least establishing that.

Multiple people recommended it to me and wanted my opinion of it, but all I could say was “I’m glad you enjoyed it”.

I like a lot of what ive read from him, and he had a lot of views that were ahead of his time (on social issues as well as scientific), but he absolutely could not write women. You could read full length books of his without a single named female character.

the book you HAVE to read to understand why Americans from the flyover states like Trump and why they would vote for him.

It sorta does that, but indirectly, I guess? To me, it was all about what’s not in the book. It was marketed as being written from the perspective of “omniscient narrator explaining why those people are the way they are”, but really it’s more “unreliable narrator explains his worldview”.

I read it probably around the same time as you, and it really just made me angry more than anything because basically the whole thesis is “poor people are poor because they are dumb”.

The fact that Purdue pharma made a pill that they claimed would last for 12 hours, when it was more like half that, so people had to either take them way more frequently (or take way bigger doses at 12 hours), and then proceeded to sell them to towns in Appalachia by the hundreds per capita is never mentioned.

There’s a whole bunch of structural problems that he just breezes by that he probably should recognize (cause I do think he’s probably intelligent), but your average person from the region may not. Basically, it’s just propaganda.

It’s fun irony to try to have a bunch of angsty teens read a book about an angsty teen. I bet it would come across very different to read it as an adult.

Filtering won’t get dissolved solids like calcium, magnesium, chloride, etc out, and those will all contribute to nucleation of ice crystals. A bunch of little ice crystals is part of how you end up with cloudy ice because it will mess up the directionality of freezing.

I’ve tried using distilled water to combat this, but it isn’t foolproof by itself without doing one of the other methods.

Edit to add: I’ve also tried boiling water to try to degass it, but it didn’t seem to be effective, either.

This is the exact method I used to use. Unfortunately, it cracked my cooler interior, so I can’t just dump water right in there anymore. I bet it depends on the exact shape of your cooler, and if you let it freeze solid or pull it out while there’s still liquid water.

I have a thick wooden towel that I use as a muddler, and I use it as a mallet to hit the back of my crappy serrated knife.

I saw a video or something of someone using cheap insulated coffee mugs (like the type you get as a freebie with a company logo on it) to freeze individual cylinders, but the effectiveness probably depends on the shape of the mug.

Forestry management is a fascinating topic.

Many commercial forests are treated like row cropped “farms”. If you are looking to grow a bunch of trees with straight trunks that grow quickly and all become harvestable at the same time, a tree farm is the way to go.

I have no true numbers to point to (though I’d love to see some), but you could imagine that if you needed to go harvest 1000 trees to send to the mill, and you have to find them in a non-plantation forest, you might have to search through 50 times as much area to get the trees you need. Logging equipment causes a lot of disturbance to underbrush, so you might get less impact on the environment as a whole by just dedicating a smaller area to the crop.

It’s the same reasons why we plant food crops in rows rather than intermingled in a forest.

Similar to food farms, tree plantations often take species from completely different geographic areas, so it’s important not to treat, for example, radiata pine plantations in new Zealand as wild spaces because they are no more wild than cornfields.

There are different styles of management for different purposes (e.g., pulp wood, construction lumber, hardwood) and the goals of the landowner (e.g., a logging company may want to maximize long term production, while on your own property, you may want to maximize continuous biodiversity).

There are also considerations for terrain and local climate. Hilly country may have bad erosion risks if there is a clear cut. Fire risks play a part. Wildlife may even benefit from clear cuts depending on the situation.

Emerald ash borer

The act that they performed this under is the “International Emergency Economic Powers Act” which allows the president to declare a national emergency and take some other actions if there is an:

unusual and extraordinary threat… to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States

It specially says the powers:

may not be exercised for any other purpose

The Powers include:

(1) At the times and to the extent specified in section 1701 of this title, the President may, under such regulations as he may prescribe, by means of instructions, licenses, or otherwise— (A) investigate, regulate, or prohibit— (i) any transactions in foreign exchange, (ii) transfers of credit or payments between, by, through, or to any banking institution, to the extent that such transfers or payments involve any interest of any foreign country or a national thereof, (iii) the importing or exporting of currency or securities, by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States; (B) investigate, block during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit, any acquisition, holding, withholding, use, transfer, withdrawal, transportation, importation or exportation of, or dealing in, or exercising any right, power, or privilege with respect to, or transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States; and.[1] © when the United States is engaged in armed hostilities or has been attacked by a foreign country or foreign nationals, confiscate any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, of any foreign person, foreign organization, or foreign country that he determines has planned, authorized, aided, or engaged in such hostilities or attacks against the United States; and all right, title, and interest in any property so confiscated shall vest, when, as, and upon the terms directed by the President, in such agency or person as the President may designate from time to time, and upon such terms and conditions as the President may prescribe, such interest or property shall be held, used, administered, liquidated, sold, or otherwise dealt with in the interest of and for the benefit of the United States, and such designated agency or person may perform any and all acts incident to the accomplishment or furtherance of these purposes.

Noticeably absent from that list is tariffs. Under the major questions doctrine, the fact that congress did not specifically delegate that power to the executive branch means that it did not do so.