I proposed to my wife at Christmas by putting the ring in a bigger box so she was surprised. It was a box for skincare product, and she was actually excited for it before she even opened it to see the ring. Obviously she was happy for the proposal, but she also seemed a little disappointed she didn’t get skincare stuff.

The following Christmas, I got her a tiny container of a skincare product she liked and put it in a ring box.

Who knows, maybe the accelerationists are right and this term will be so bad leftists will actually unify and start acting strategically.

Probably not, but maybe.

The far right has gotten their act together, productivity-wise. They’re out there publishing a literal handbook, and they step in line to implement it.

Where’s the left’s Project 2025? Blue-no-matter-who has always been a time-buying strategy. But if you want things to go great, we have to do something with the time we buy.

The core of that something is organization. Not just locally (though yes, locally), confederate with other groups. Until we have a MAGA level movement with MAGA level engagement and MAGA level narratives, the left will remain a fractured archipelago.

That means getting along with all the thousands of “wrong” leftists long enough to build common ground. That means a dead-simple, unified narrative. That means recognizing poisoned vocabulary and framing policy in more 'murican terms.

Just in general, swallowing our pride to focus more on getting results than being right.

Step by step. I’d rather push left from the Democrats’ status quo than the Republicans’.

Maybe early detection?

They could digitize creatures and encapsulate them in pocket sized containers. Their tech is a bit more advanced

No snow.

Siding is stucco, so I’m not worried about wood rot

House is on the north, garage is on the south, the 24’ is along the E-W line, so the sun should track right over the breezeway

If you can taste cinnamon, you put too much. It gives almost a smokiness while making the sweetness of the tomato pop. But you should use so little you worry it won’t do anything.

Yet

And he gets to keep the flute after!

I suggest breaking it down into sub questions based on expertise of the audience and nature of the information: technical, narrative, cultural, emotional, etc.

I love nature. Termite mounds are nature, honeycombs are nature, spiderwebs are nature. Humans are a part of nature and our infrastructure is a part of who we are.

Carving out exceptions for human artifacts like this takes for granted that a bunch of arboreal primates figured out how to melt down the rocks themselves to extract their purest essence, then wound that essence into ropes that contain the lightning we learned to generate ourselves to power the many other artifacts we developed to bring light into our dwellings, communicate with primates on the other side of the planet, and automate the menial tasks of our lives.

While certainly selfish and misguided at times, everything we make is nature, just as much as honeycombs and spiderwebs.

This is too broad. It’s like asking “what’s the best wrench to tighten nuts and bolts?” For some applications that’s a torque wrench, some it’s a box end, some it’s a socket wrench, some it’s a crescent wrench, sometimes it’s a pair of vice grips and a hammer. Anything that could properly be called a mode of communication has use cases where it’s clearer than others.

The OBD code that’s unintelligible to the lay person is the clearest way to communicate a discrete engine problem to a mechanic. A graph that plots a particular change over time might perfectly communicate the raw data, while being incapable of communicating narrative context. A meme image or referential quote might perfectly communicate a specific emotional concept to a broad group that gets the reference, while being totally opaque to those who don’t.

I don’t know of a single fruit that’s poisonous to every animal. There are fruits that are poisonous to certain animals, but that serves mostly to select for particular animals. A popular example is capsaicin, which is painful for mammals to eat but doesn’t affect birds. This suggests that these fruits do want to be eaten, they’re just selective about which animals eat them.

And even assuming the most woo-woo levels of plant consciousness, fruit farms create nowhere near the suffering of factory farms. Factory farms are a life of constant suffering, fruit farms are just plants vibing.

Again, you’re just debatelording at this point.

Because “good” and “bad” have nothing to do with my point, which is about purpose. The purpose of fruits is to be eaten, that is their explicit function. While the pigs get some benefits (in principle, in practice factory farms are horrific places which are absolutely less desirable to the pigs than the wild) they do not volunteer themselves for slaughter the way plants volunteer fruit for consumption.

Being eaten is the core benefit of fruit, and all else being equal being eaten is preferable to not. All else being equal, the pig benefits more by not being eaten, and just living peacefully on a farm.

Is it us, or it that’s messed up?

Yes, and this is an undesirable result. You can eke out an existence with no legs, but it is not the preferred state of things. You’re just debatelording now.

:

Time matters because that’s how evolution cements biological distinction. Domesticated cow and pig varieties can certainly survive off of farms. There’s the famous example of the cow that escaped to live with a herd of bison, and feral pigs are a well known phenomenon. Yes they are in symbiosis, but it’s not biologically obligatory symbiosis.